Quotes About Journalism

Journalists don't have audiences - they have publics who can respond instantly and globally, positively or negatively, with a great deal more power than the traditional letters to the editor could wield.

I think the future of journalism is going to be a battle between caution and recklessness. And I think a little bit of recklessness is a good thing, as some of the WikiLeaks cables proved.

Let's face it: WikiLeaks exists because the mainstream media haven't done their job.

Free speech and freedom of the press are under attack in the U.K. I cannot return to England, my country, because of my journalistic work with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and at WikiLeaks. There are things I feel I cannot even write.

Discerning the legal difference between what WikiLeaks did and what news organizations do is difficult and would set a terrible precedent.

In a film muddied by fictional detail, the new Spielberg production Fifth Estate's portrayal of the Guardian's work with Wikileaks is accurate in describing the running dispute between journalists who wanted to redact documents to make them safe and Julian Assange, who wanted no such restraint.

Democratic societies need a strong media, and WikiLeaks is part of that media.

WikiLeaks, for me, has not only that element in it of journalism publishing, but also the way in which it does it, with its - the concept we have of scientific journalism, I find very important and really appeals to me, that all of the source documents should be there.

RT was one of the first channels to cover the Wikileaks story and to interview Julian Assange a long time ago, way before it made headlines around the globe.

I think it's weird that the news cedes so much ground to Wikipedia. That isn't true in other informational sectors.

Working as a journalist, I was always tempted to lie. I felt I could do dialogue better than the person I was interviewing. I felt I could lie better than Nixon and be more concise than some random person I was covering.

It's not a good thing to be friends with people you're covering. There's just no point in doing it. It's tempting, but they're not going to consider you their friend anyway. They just know that you're somebody that can do something for them.

I've been a radio reporter for ten years, and if I learned anything from my time at 'This American Life,' it's how to craft a narrative so that even if the ending is ambiguous, it is somehow satisfying.

Those few people who do respond to the dire conditions of the future - journalists, environmentalists, behavioral scientists - tend not to be powerful.

Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

One of the differences between what happens when an author and a gossip columnist sit down to write a book is that the former tends to make every effort at disguising and protecting their sources, while the latter doesn't particularly care.

As a journalist, one tends to think there's nothing off limits.

You could say that any book that takes a position is not fair, unless you keep saying, 'On the one hand, on the other...' and take a great deal of trouble to present both sides. That kind of journalism tends not to be very interesting.

Amateurism has its place in government, in journalism and also on the tennis court, but lack of expertise means politicians routinely promise far more than they achieve.

In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.

In fiction, you learn about pacing and how to build tension - which is something you want in a really good nonfiction feature article as well.

With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a pompous contradiction in terms.

Journalists casually use terms like crossing the border illegally when referring to asylum seekers - when in fact there is no law that says they must use the ports of entry.

In journalism, I have done many a bad report. Some have been exceptionally terrible.